I’m not going to waste or mince words: If I had my way, there would be a purge of the episcopate that would make Stalin blush. It is beyond disgusting and depressing to see the Church of God in such a state.

Over the last few summers, I’ve written a few posts about how I use technology and what tech I use. I wanted to give an update.

The foundation level is still basically the same: I mostly work on an iPad Pro (it’s the first-gen baby pro) and a Mac Mini. I am waiting on almost literally the edge of my seat for a Mini refresh or Air/Escape refresh, because both work and home Minis are getting long in the tooth. While I don’t particularly want a notebook, and while I realize I’ve been a cheerleader for a Mini, I should admit to having been tempted by the idea of a docked Escape (i.e. the non-touchbar MBP) that could be undocked and come with me on vacation, to client-sites, or if I need to visit England. For that matter, an Air would probably work if they were to offer a 16gb option. We’ll see what options Apple provides this fall, because surely the 2018 MBP refresh can’t be it.

My two other daily-use tech products are just incremental upgrades from previous iterations. Last year, I said my upgrade-path from the MiBand 1 would be a MiBand 2 rather than an Apple Watch. IT in this phase of my life is grey-collar work, not white-collar. So that’s what I did when the MiBand’s charger went walkabout earlier this year; the 2 has marginally more utility than the 1, but it’s still cheap and cheerful, and I don’t feel the anxiety about doing it harm that I surely would wearing an Apple Watch.

That anxiety, though, is a live concern with the iPhone 8. Having set up many of them for other people, I was anxious that the glass back would be anxiety-inducing, and I certainly treat it more gingerly than I did the 7. Nevertheless, I upgraded for two reasons: The Qi charging is very convenient, and it’s just where Apple seems to be going, so might as well bite the bullet now. Chances that the iPhone 9 won’t be glass-backed? None. (I went with the Product Red 8, by the way, which does look very cool. I underestimated how much I would enjoy this phone as a physical item.) Anyway, my intention is to be on an annual cycle of trading in and moving on to the current model, and being offset from Apple’s release-cycle by about six months places me comfortably far back from the bleeding edge. The X has no appeal yet simply because it is too new a product, the first iteration of a new kind of phone whereas the 8 feels like the ongoing maturation of a stable branch of tech.

On the software side, there have been some significant changes. 2Do remains my nominal project-manager, but I’m using it very little at the moment—mostly for tracking longer-term projects and a few recurring tasks. Day-to-day and week-to-week tasks are moving through Reminders.app and Trello. This mostly isn’t a reflection on 2Do. (If this will suffice as a vote of confidence, I did ultimately pony up and buy the Mac app, too, a point on which I was on the fence last year). It just reflects the kind of tasks that are on my docket lately. There just isn’t much overspill that feels apt for capture into 2Do. Thus, for example, the many tasks in the last three months leading up to the release-date on The Racetrack Chronicle were managed as cards on a list on my TRC Trello board, not a 2Do project.

Still: To some extent, this shift reflects on 2Do. Reminders is very convenient for what GTD-speak calls “capture,” and so was Wunderlist. And it’s easier to shuffle things around in Trello, and it was in Wunderlist, too. 2Do would benefit from less friction on each of these points. Trello also has superior search and archival functions, along with a convenient Slack integration. So, for example, when I order a part, I have a Workflow that sends an email and creates a Trello card in the appropriate place with a due date. If the part doesn’t show up on time I have a reminder to follow up with Purchasing, and if it does, I have a flexible housing for any follow-up that I need to do in terms of deployment or whatever. This kind of flexibility is a boon.

(I use Slack a little, mostly, at the moment, as a channel to receive some automated notifications coming out of IFTTT.)

Speaking of Workflow: My post last year mentioned Workflow’s acquisition by Apple, and as of WWDC ’18, we learned that Workflow is going away and being absorbed into a new app called Siri Shortcuts. I’ve not jumped into the Testflight for Shortcuts and I’m kind of chary about doing so, although I am, for the second year in a row, running the beta of the next iOS. The feeling in the Apple podcasts to which I listen seems to be that Shortcuts is mostly really good, so I have high hopes, but I will wait and see. In the meantime, it remains difficult to justify sinking too much time into building new Workflows that may or may not continue to run after September.

On the writing side of things, I ended up buying Scrivener to do the last rounds of polishing and put-together on my first book. I could probably have finished it in Pages, truth to tell. Nevertheless, book #2 is shaping up to be a quantum-leap in scale, complexity, and number of characters, and Scrivener has some tools for managing such projects that I felt I’d need sooner or later, so why not just cut to the chase, buy it now, and take advantage of its features to finish book #1? I wouldn’t say that I love Scrivener, but it’s specifically designed for putting together larger writing-projects, it does so effectively, and so it’s the “great attractor” toward which all text ultimately flows, wherever it’s written. And it’s written in all kinds of places. Anything in teleplay format (see this post) gets written in Gdocs on the Mac. Mostly everything else gets drafted in Notes.app on the iPad Pro and/or the Mac; in the last few month, an increasing fraction of writing that starts on the iPad have started in Drafts or especially Bear (which are really nice short-form writing environments) but they usually transition immediately to Notes because that has the advantage of syncing everywhere immediately.

So that’s where things stand as of July 2018. I expect to be upgrading on the Mac side this fall, although my iPad Pro probably has at least another year of life in it; I’m still very happy with that purchase. (And, for that matter, with my first iPad, which continues to chug along as an iBooks reader and occasional email reader and Firestick remote on the nightstand.)

I am delighted to report that after two years in the works, The Racetrack Chronicle is now available, free, in all major eBook formats. You can download it at this link.

Here’s the blurb:

Growing up in bucolic Falstone, Picon, Maggie Edmondson looked up at an endless night sky and knew that no matter what happened, the Colonial Fleet was out there. Protecting her. Visits to the aging warship Galactica reinforce her association of the Fleet with a sense of safety and security.

Six years before the Fall, after a shattering personal tragedy, Edmondson flees to the Poseidon Colonial Military Academy where she is befriended by Abigail Ainslie. Their motivations and personalities seem polar opposites: Edmondson is a withdrawn, bookish, depressed country-girl, while Ainslie seems to be an effervescent, cosmopolitan, and promiscuous Marine-Corps brat. But they become mutual supporters, and after they stumble into a secret that threatens the careers of several prominent officers, they will find themselves assigned to a ship that is no one’s idea of a plum assignment… Except Maggie’s. For the next sixteen months, as the storm clouds of the Fall gather around the Colonies, Edmondson is even more blissfully-unaware than most. Sequestered on the Galactica with a ragtag collection of officers and men deemed problem-children by Fleet Command, she is busy falling in love and planning a future. The events of the Fall will shatter this happy bubble and set her on a very different, momentous path.

In Battlestar Galactica, Margaret “Racetrack” Edmondson repeatedly played a pivotal but unsung role. Now, in “The Racetrack Chronicle,” find out where she came from and who she was.

This is a major personal milestone; a separate post will address some personal issues with the book, but suffice to say that I’ve sunk a lot of work and love into this project, and I hope that it will prove enjoyable.

In season three of Battlestar Galactica, with our heroes’ backs against the wall, the eponymous ship carries out an incredibly risky maneuver that fans have called “the Adama maneuver.” She jumps into the atmosphere, launches fighter support for the people on the ground while falling like a rock, and jumps back out seconds before she would have hit the hard-deck. I was asked to take a stab at the Galactica‘s altitude when she jumps out of the atmosphere. We can do that using the pinhole projection formula and some geometry; the answer is approximately 16,000′. Let’s work through the math and some questions.

Question 1: How far is Galactica from the camera?The formula is x/f = X/d, “where x is the size of the object on the sensor, f is focal length of the lens, X is the size of the object, and d is distance from nodal point to the object.” Steve McNutt reports that BSG was shot using Sony F900 cameras (16.99mm sensor, apparently) and used 27mm, 72mm, and 112mm lenses depending on the application. For this kind of shot, it’s a safe bet that 27mm-lenses were used. That lets us plug in some initial values: x/27mm = 1445m/d.

In the picture on my iPad screen, the frame is 15.3mm diagonal and the Galactica is about 6.2mm, or 40.5228758% of the frame diagonal; so the width on the sensor is 40.5228758% of 16.99mm, i.e. 6.8848366mm. So now we have the equation: 6.8848366 / 27 = 1445000 / d, solve for d. It comes out to about 5666.81m

But because the ship isn’t directly above us, we’re not done yet.

Question 2: What is Galactica’s altitude?Here’s where we have to settle with being as precise as is reasonably-possible—“within a fudge,” as I like to say. I set a protractor on the vertical of the scaffold to Tigh’s left with 90 degrees directly north along that axis; Galactica’s angle on that appears to be about 60 degrees. That gives us values for one angle (we can infer the other two) and the hypotenuse of a triangle. That yields an altitude of 4907.601m, or 16,101’, which feels plausible.

Question 3: What was the margin of error—how long before they were a smear on the hard-deck?To know how fast the Galactica falls, we need to know her mass and (to calculate wind-resistance) surface-area. With her flight-pods retracted, Galactica has a beam of about 400m, so with her 1,445m length (excluding engine-bells), she presents a surface area of 578,000 m/2. Simplifying somewhat, she has an overall height of 200m. This give her an internal volume of 115,600,000 m/3.

It seems reasonable to suppose that her internal arrangements are much like that of any other aircraft-carrier, just on a larger scale. Let’s consider the conveniently-oblong USS Wasp. The Wasp displaces 40,532 long tons; she is 257m long, 32 meter beam, and keel to flight-deck, she’s about 33 meters tall, giving her an internal volume of 271,392 m/3. That makes the Galactica 425.95 times larger than the Wasp, and gives us a rough number of 17,264,691.7 long tons for her mass.

On these figures, we can calculate the Galactica‘s terminal velocity at 995.7 m/s. From an altitude of 4907.601m, she is just over 4.92 seconds above the hard-deck when she jumps out.

Question 5: Do these numbers tally with “99,000”?When we cut to the CIC, Cpt. Kelly announces that the Galactica is at an altitude of “99,000, falling like a rock.” No unit is specified, as is the show’s way. The ship then falls for ~24.5 seconds before executing the jump into orbit, and because we can assume that she has already reached terminal velocity by the time Kelly announces 99k, we can say that the Galactica is at that moment at an altitude of 29,302.251m or 96,135′. This is so close to Kelly’s 99,000 number that we can rationalize the difference away under at least two plausible explanations (timeline compression or unit variation) and say that the calculated numbers do square with what is on screen.

Question 6: What would have happened had the Galactica not jumped out in time?Everyone would have died. The impact of a massive object (17.5 billion kg) traveling at just short of a thousand meters per second would yield 8,695,601,022,417KJ, the equivalent of a 2.07-megaton nuclear bomb. Adama would have died; Tigh and Tyrol would have died; the Cylons would have died; the people on the ground—all of them—would have died. To see what a weapon of that yield would do to Caprica City, click here: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/classic/…

So, to sum-up. The battlestar Galactica has a mass of just over 17 million long tons. She jumps into the atmosphere at an altitude above 100,000’. She swiftly accelerates to a terminal velocity of nearly a kilometer per second while launching vipers, and jumps away from an altitude of 16,000’ not five seconds before she would have hit the hard-deck causing an explosion that would have evaporated everything within half a mile and would have leveled and killed everything within two miles.

For two years, I relied on Wunderlist to organize my life. Everyone’s mind works a little differently, so many task list apps exist; Wunderlist fit me very well, and it came as terrible news to learn recently that it was going away. Still, the timing was felicitous. Were I ever to transition to a new task system, that was a good moment, because I’d been in a new job for long enough to have gotten a feel for how tasks play out (and to have a degree of comfort with my daily routines around it) but not long enough for patterns to have congealed.

I loved many things about Wunderlist: The frictionless interface, easily-repeating tasks, easy subtasks and notes, web interface, and the ability to share lists with my wife and colleagues was very useful. Vitally, everything synchronized between multiple devices. I knew that Wunderlist was always there, always at the right end of the dock, always sync’d. Worth saying, though, is that an alarm-clock that works great 99 nights out of 100 is useless, no matter how well it works on the average night. That’s why IFTTT dropped out of my life: No matter how useful it was when it worked, if it couldn’t be relied upon to work every time, it was unreliable, period. That’s no way to live. To be sure: I have a Kurzweil K2000 which randomly resets, but who cares when I use it only very occasionally, in the studio? By contrast, systems on which we rely, especially those on which we rely when our brains are at a nadir (mornings, for me, but perhaps travel for you, for example) have to run dependably, flawlessly. Systems that can’t be backed-up easily and restored readily don’t encourage investment of time.

The feeling, then, that Wunderlist was no longer dependable, that on any given day I could wake up and it could be gone or not, was crazy-makingly ominous. I’d love to be able to say that I exhaustively considered all my alternatives, but in reality, with time nipping at my heels, I seriously considered only two options: Todoist, and 2Do. (A third, Omnifocus, dropped out of contention quite quickly because it seemed like overkill—I use my task list a lot, but I don’t feel that I’m a power-user in a way that would justify the cost and expense, including administrative overhead, of Omnifocus.)

Todoist started strong but came up short. I appreciated their canny move of providing an “import from Wunderlist” feature, although I was unimpressed by the sloppy implementation. Still, I loved its flexibility in easily moving, structuring, and completing tasks, almost entirely arbitrarily, and at first blush, its daily email summary feature seemed neat. Web interface—check. Sync across multiple devices—check. But over a couple of weeks of testing, the web interface began to feel irritating, and the email summary… naggy? The death-blow was learning that Todoist doesn’t really understand repeating tasks. It claims to, but it seems to me that an app does not actually understand recurring tasks if, when the task repeats, the subtasks that were completed on last run remain completed rather than returning to pristine state.

(Todoist also has some very cool Workflow integration. But Workflow—we learned in this same time-period—also has an uncertain future. While I continue to use Workflow, I feel disinclined to pour time into it, and I’d prefer to focus on other ways to work.)

That left 2Do, which does understand recurring tasks. Its pro version syncs across all devices, and it has a Mac client too, which I’ve confessedly not tried because of its offputting price-tag. It also has a number of features that I wanted in Wunderlist (e.g. hiding tasks that are scheduled but not yet relevant) and others that I hadn’t thought of using but which have proven useful (e.g. geotagging tasks, which can provide reminder notifications if you have location services enabled). The interface is quite clean and straightforward, although I do wish there were better gestures. I also don’t quite understand why they don’t take what seems to me the obvious step of differentiating projects from checklists (they’re indistinct) by saying one or the other automatically completes when all subtasks are checked off. Batch-editing takes a little time to get the hang of, but once it’s familiar, it’s very helpful.

What it lacks is a web interface. But it does have an email capture function that has some appeal. I’m wary about adding too much automation; I don’t want repetitious stuff that seems important but becomes a distraction and ultimately devalues the task-list framework. But at the same time, I want to take advantage of useful automations. So, for example, when I borrow a physical book from the library and forget to take it back on-time, I get a standard-format email. It’s easy to write a rule that forwards those emails with a rewritten subject and so add a task. Experimenting with that will come next—for right now, I’m using Siri and Reminders, which is acceptable, but it adds another layer, another app to check during the day.

All this beings me to a place where my task-list system is still somewhat plastic, but has mostly settled down after the shock of Wunderlist’s terminal prognosis. I still have Wunderlist and ToDoist installed on my iPad, and use them in parallel while I run out some longer-term projects that were deeply-entangled in Wunderlist. Effectively, Todoist has become a “backup” of Wunderlist in case it completely goes away without warning before those projects have wound up. And I might continue using Wunderlist for some minor shared tasks with my wife, because 2Do doesn’t seem to handle shared tasks well. But overall, I’m done with Wunderlist, all in on 2Do, and minded to rate my current situation “acceptable.”

(Since WWDC, 2Do has moved over one spot, to the center of the dock, but that is prep for some changes in my habits that iOS11 will force, rather than reflecting any changes in how I use task lists or preferences quoad 2Do versus Wunderlist.)

Speaking of things that are acceptable, while I’m here, let’s talk about the Xiaomi MiBand, which reached its first anniversary with me last month. I continue to recommend it, and a year of wearing it hasn’t much changed my initial impression. It does some basic health-tracking (mainly steps, which it does well, and sleep, which it does adequately in tandem with Sleep Cycle), and it vibrates for a silent (ish) alarm and Incoming call notification. My alarm-call and wheels-up are before my wife needs to be awake, so the silent alarm is very helpful. So, too, is the notification for calls, and the ability to set a delay to screen wrong-numbers. Battery life is more like a Kindle (the e-paper ones, not the Fires) than a tablet—weeks between charges. Love it. The one thing that I’d really like as an improvement is to have it ankle-located, and I’ve yet to find a band that’s long enough to serve as an ersatz anklet, but that’s a small nitpick.

What a year wearing the MiBand has proved, though, is that the Apple Watch isn’t for me—not right now, anyway. The MiBand’s selling-point is that it’s an entry-level wearable—it’s cheap, which means that my anxiety about the potential for it getting dinged or destroyed is nil. IT isn’t always white-collar work, and the MiBand has gotten dinged, dunked, dropped, covered in dust and gunk, and even lost a few times, but it’s still working fine, and were it to drop dead tonight, oh well, I’m out $20+S&H. No matter how robust the Apple Watch may actually be, the stress of having hundreds of dollars of computer on one’s wrist, unprotected, strikes me as something I don’t need in my life.

I’ve toyed with upgrading to the MiBand2, also budget-priced and which has marginally-better notifications (or perhaps a Lenovo HW01, which is appealing). But I always choke on a very simple question: What additional app would I want to be notified about? The MiBand notifies for calls, including via Teams or Skype; do I really want a notification for texts? No. Social media? Gods, no. Email? Not really. So what, then? It’s possible to imagine a world in which the granularity of notifications becomes such that only, say, genuinely-concerning weather or genuinely-interesting news/text/email come through, but we aren’t there yet. The only thing that might be useful is notifications coming out of Calendar or, perhaps unsurprisingly, 2Do. But that’s for the future.

It is now one year since I wrote the first draft of the first piece in what became “The Racetrack Chronicle” and the continuity in which it exists. As that project has sprawled and expanded across multiple works and time-periods, it has become difficult to explain, so this post will attempt to concisely introduce: “what the frak is up with all this?”

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” -Sagan

On day one, all I set out to do was to explain why Maggie Edmondson joined the mutiny. But I’m not capable of writing stories in a vacuum; hell, I can barely write stories at all. It’s black-magic to me how writers do that. As a substitute, I found myself constructing fully-formed characters and a fully-imagined universe in which they existed, hoping that with sufficient detail added, the paths down which the characters would walk through the world would appear. It worked. The Chronicle, which went to the powers-that-be in December, and whether good or bad, was the best that I could do by Maggie. She and the coterie of people around her have become real, fully-realized people over the course of the project, and hopefully the tiny subset of the whole that made it onto the page reflects that.

But with the apple-pie baked, I was left with the universe. Quite aside from everything that had landed on the pages of the main cycle, I had dozens of little vignettes written on background, and thousands of words written suggestive of the backstory, either expanding on the QMX map on this detail, or explaining why I couldn’t accept that detail. (See this post and this post, for example.) Growing out of that work, I had the beginnings of a second novel, too, and yet more background material written around that, sketching what the universe looked like. Perhaps attempting to distract myself from worry about the Chronicle or work on the second novel, I have been writing a number of short pieces, one-shots that sketch parts of the universe in which the larger pieces take place.

Some of them are, effectively, deleted-scenes from the Chronicle—either moments in Maggie’s life that I wanted to see or things in the universe that I wanted to see and was able to see by sending Maggie to see them. In this category belong Sovremennyy, Dry-Dock, Crossroads, and Chalk. There are many more of these in the pipeline, and yet more that will likely never see the light of day.

Others provide context for the universe that the Caprica-centric show(s) couldn’t. They are intended to imply a vast and fittingly-epic historical backdrop to the colonies without bogging the reader down in the details. Thus, Aftermath sketches the world and history of Aquaria and poses some obvious questions about survivors, and Carillon has a Frank Herbert feeling as it sketches an epic history of Virgon and the early development of the colonies. (The latter references the events that conclude Yeats’ “Lords of Kobol” trilogy and implicitly picks up thereafter.) These pieces are intended to be interesting milieu vignettes that also imply a context for characters elsewhere in the continuity.

The collection that’s most interesting to me today has only one published piece, Atalanta, although several more are in the pipeline. One of the characters who lurked in the background of my notes for months was Margaret Cavendish, the Churchillian first President of the Colonies, whom my notes sketched as a combination of Elena Kagan, Zephyr Teachout, and Antonin Scalia, a kind of combative but eloquent lawyer, a large, forceful personality who in some unspecified way became first the prime-mover behind the Articles of Colonization and then President of that government, for her sins. Maggie will later be named for the Pican Cavendish, as will the Colonial equivalent of the White House. Writing her was always going to be difficult because of the time period; I try very hard to avoid nailing down too many specifics about the Cylon War, because the less we know, the better. But I wanted to go back and meet her, and I suspected that her reputation was a facade. Having established the notion that Picon and Virgon have a complex history, the starting-point was a vivid image of a meeting between the Pican Cavendish and the Queen of Virgon, with very specific actors in mind, Rekha Sharma and Shohreh Aghdashloo. I don’t know why that image came to mind, but I liked it, I liked the voices—I almost always write dialogue with specific actors in mind, to keep characters distinct; as Lacey astutely noted, I am effectively shooting film in my mind’s eye—and I liked the energy each brings, so it stuck. (Sharma struck me as able to reflect both public confidence and private disarray, and Aghdashloo’s embodiment of Avasarala in the TV version of “The Expanse” was fittingly-regal.) That piece will make it to air eventually, there’s a sequencing issue, but what I should say for now is that I like the idea of a character who has become so mythologized within her own lifetime as to become unrecognizable to herself—who are our heroes behind the mask?

The Chronicle itself is novel-length before we even count the voluminous appendices; hopefully it will see the light of day in due course. The published one-shots run about 16,000 words thusfar; that’s a novelette by itself, and an eBook collection of them will appear at some point. Timing is the issue; there are many more pieces in the pipeline that should be included and I am torn between publishing now and issuing revisions or publishing the whole thing after the fact. About the second novel, I’m going to keep my peace for now beyond saying that I think that it is a piece that is in keeping with the spirit of Moore’s reimagining but which Moore and his team could not have written.

It really has become a whole universe—and all I wanted was an apple pie!

This afternoon, I posted one of my “long grass historical background on the Colonies” pieces, this one tackling Virgon. Unusually, this one has a lengthy textual appendix. It also has two graphical appendices that necessitate a post here, charting 1,891 years of royal history: In genealogical form and tabular form. Buried deep in the early history is a homage to Frank Herbert’s “Dune” universe (which everyone ought to get) among various other little easter-eggs/nods (which perhaps only a few will).

At some point, I will compile a complete list and probably a .ePub book of the one-shots that I have put out in support of the Chronicle, but I have more to do at this point, so I’m holding off on it waiting for a natural stopping-point. As to when the Chronicle itself may appear—I’m as anxious as you if not more so. Watch this space.

Turns out that north of 75% of Earth’s oxygen is produced by water-based algae rather than land-based plants, and humans could, in theory, acclimate to anything down to about 11% oxygen. Which means that Aquariacould be a viable (i.e. human-sustaining) biosphere despite lacking significant landmass.

In “Travelers,” Leah Cairns is ready for her close-up. Well, yes, literally—but I mean that in episode ten, “Kathryn,” she’s finally given a well-earned showcase. No spoilers for this post, just praise.

First, a brief introduction. In the same sense that “Battlestar Galactica” was but wasn’t a sci-fi show, “Travelers” is but isn’t a time-travel show. Its premise is pregnant with the kind of implications raised by “Caprica” and “Dollhouse”: In the pilot, a group of people from the future permanently imprint their consciousnesses into the brains of present-day people, whom they then pretend to be while carrying out… Other activities. For ethical reasons (sometimes dispensed-with later in the season), travelers choose hosts who were about to die. As Topher observes in “Dollhouse,” you can’t imprint over a full brain because it’ll implode—he was right, and man, it looks like a painful way to go. And as in “Dollhouse,” the wetware interface is fascinating: What if you got a doll drunk and swapped their imprint? Would the second doll also be drunk? Here, one host was a heroin addict. A non-addict traveler is imprinted into an addict’s body; the body that is now the traveler’s body is dependent on heroin, thus, the traveler is too. Another host had cognitive damage. The traveler doesn’t have the same problems that the previous owner did, but it stresses and destabilizes the imprint. (Rebuking Zoe Graystone’s algorithm concept in “Caprica,” the same traveler discovers that the bio they had built for her host from her social-media footprint is wrong.)

The group’s leader is imprinted into Grant “Mac” MacLaren (Eric McCormack), a 15-year FBI veteran who’s eleven years into his marriage to Kathryn “Kat” MacLaren. That’s a lot of history for the traveler to have to know if he’s to successfully fool his colleagues, and even more (and more intimate) history if he’s to fool her. This is where Cairns—astutely if amusingly for BSG fans cast as Kat—comes in. (The universe will be out of balance until “Travelers” casts Luciana Carro as a character called Maggie.)

Cairns excels at building out a three-dimensional character and projecting it almost entirely through performance. Give her dialogue and she’ll kill with it, but that ability to convey much without saying much (cf. Edward James Olmos) let her build Maggie “Racetrack” Edmondson into a fully-realized person in “Battlestar.” Other characters were more visible, but they had more lines; Cairns built a character who feels real, specific, and profoundly sympathetic (I have light-heartedly but non-jokingly argued that Racetrack is the protagonist) almost entirely on performance. That ability also made her the perfect choice to play Lois in “Interstellar.” We meet Lois only briefly, and she has only a few lines, but in Cairns’ hands, you get an immediate empathy for her—you have a sense of who this woman is and how her life (especially her marriage) has gone, and you sympathize with her plight. Like Racetrack, Lois feels real. She’s sitting at a table with two oscar nominees, each given a ton of dialogue, and she acts them both out of the room. (If acting were about saying the lines, I could do it!)

Kat is a supporting character, threaded through season one until her eponymous episode, “Kathryn,” a long-overdue showcase. It’s a recurrent part that could have faded in and out of the background (cf. Philip’s attorney). But just as Mac is trying to intuit his relationship with this woman, the audience is in the same position—we don’t know these people, and what a great actor can do is make us care enough about the character to want to infer it, and then give us enough subtext to let us. Cairns builds out another character who feels real and three-dimensional and every bit as fully-formed as the main characters. When we find out that she works as a restorationist (prompting an impressed Mac to utter my favorite line from season one: “What you do is amazing—you take something neglected, something that’s rare and beautiful, and make it whole again”), it doesn’t feel like a surprise, it just fits. I promised no spoilers, but for another example, it surely won’t come as a surprise that Mac isn’t as good an actor as is McCormack, and the changes in his behavior plant suspicions in Kat’s mind. There’s a moment in episode seven, “Protocol 5,” in which the tape visibly comes off the end of Kat’s world and she starts to unwind; happily the writers give her lines, but that’s gravy; Cairns’ reactions sell it and convey Kat’s turmoil.

Thus, when we arrive at episode ten and see some of the backstory on Kat and Mac, it feels all the more real and organic—and consequently, even more painful. I promised no spoilers; suffice to say that in a series of flashbacks we see this couple’s life and it’s again Cairns who does the heavy-lifting in selling the emotion of it, culminating in a brief present-tense exchange with Mac that’s just heartbreaking. We watched it yesterday morning, and as I write this (Tuesday morning), I still feel quite emotionally-drained and sad. To work, fiction has to be true: It has to be more true than real life. “Kathryn” was that, in spades. It’s having a lingering impact. That’s rare; “Leverage” did that sometimes: The flashbacks of Tim Hutton screaming and hugging his dead son are still wrenchingly-painful to watch, and lingered for days after first viewing. But, of course, Hutton won an Oscar. Hint hint, The Emmys.

To single out one actor for praise is by no means to imply any slight of the others. The entire cast is excellent; I haven’t seen McCormack since “Will & Grace,” so his turn as MacLaren was revelatory to me. But I want to single out three others: Patrick Gilmore (David), Jared Abrahamson (Trevor) and Reilly Dolman (Philip, the afore-mentioned heroin-addict). When saw them in the trailer, I admit to thinking “oh lord, here we go—teen drama, the Dave Mustaine wannabe and the jock. Meh.” I really wanted to like this show, so that made me nervous. But Abrahamson and Dolman make none of the choices feared by silly, jaded me, and both characters prove hugely and unexpectedly enjoyable. Toward the end of the afore-mentioned “Protocol 5,” there’s a lovely moment with the two of them that (like so many moments on “Leverage”) makes you think “I would watch a whole show of these two.” Meanwhile, David is in a situation that, from the outside, could look sketchy, and Gilmore imbues him with a decency and integrity—he is immediately and visibly trustworthy, honest, incorrupt—a good man. There’s a similar character in my work (also coincidentally called David) who, almost alone, never had a mental casting attached to him; watching Gilmore as this David, I felt for the first time that I know how my David looks.

It’s difficult to explain the tone of the show, but season two of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” might be an apt reference-point: The material is serious, and so the tone is, too, but it’s also cut with the perfect amount of humor. “Orphan Black” tries to do something similar, but leaves most of its humor to a comic-relief character; “Travelers” integrates it better, salting the script with wry lines that the actors deadpan: “That’s a federal offense,” Special Agent MacLaren tells David in the pilot; “really?” David asks (Gilmore perfectly playing the nervousness); “No, I’m messing with you.” “He’s suddenly a better shot,” Mac’s partner tells Kat; “yeah,” she replies, and in the one Kat line that recalls Racetrack’s mordant sarcasm, Cairns deadpans: “He’s suddenly better at a lot of things.” I lol’d, as they say.

There is so much more that I should probably talk about, but this post is already long. The show’s well-written, well-acted, well-scored, and well-shot. You really can’t ask for more; go to Netflix, binge it up to episode eleven, “Marcy,” and then we’ll all meet back here next Monday and watch the finale with Canada, where it’s still airing—kay?

I have a new-ish piece to present. (It was actually published in late October and I forgot to say anything here.) I have spent a lot of time this year in the company of Maggie “Racetrack” Edmondson, as posts passim explain. Racetrack is a pivotal character, and I have lamented that Bear McCreary never wrote a Racetrack theme. It’s an odd lacuna: Supporting characters were never excluded. There’s a Kat theme, which is superlative, definitive, even, and even, gods help us, a Novacek theme, even though he only appears in one episode.) I had given some thought to what a Maggie theme might look like had McCreary written one. There were some obvious parameters: The show’s soundtrack has a particular vernacular, and what I know about Maggie that you (yet) don’t is that she grew up in a rural setting. A theme for her should be Appalachian and limpid, yet it also has to be capable of expanding into something fittingly grand and heroic. Then, one day, I woke up one day with a theme in my head, whole and complete; I immediately went down to the studio (that’s what it’s there for) and spent the day first getting the idea on tape and then trying to get it into some kind of organization. The execution is not optimal, and I feel like the theme is perhaps too innocent, even, but as a sketch to accompany the Racetrack Chronicle, I like it.